Daniel E. Smith

A natural growth and change implicit in these painted environments mirrors the cycles of every life. Reality persists despite our best efforts to manipulate and order life.

Each expanse suggests the solitary nature of the effort to understand experience. Each structure suggests the communal aspects of that struggle. Beginnings and remains engage and define each space as a question.
These ordered glances of the world are my chosen vocabulary. The subject is the cycle of creation and decay. The tools are light and color. The evidence of changes and chance in each painting persists in a sequenced, layered witness to time.

Why I Paint

I spent a childhood obsessed with books, wooden blocks, sand castles, tinker toys and Lincoln Logs involved in spaces I could make. Composed worlds where ideas and stories were built and destroyed away from shared places and responsibilities. The spaces of my paintings are stages for memory and hope, anticipation and fear, experience and uncertainty.

Each work shares a passion for color, surface, space, and form Each explores technique, accepts chance and quests for depth of emotion and spirit. I allow former images and painting decisions to persist beneath the surface as evidence of this exploration. These works are an offering of continuance, recollection, discovery, and hope.

The Artist

The third child of ten in a Catholic family I entered a monastery after graduating college. A cycle of prayer, meditation, and work over twenty three years grew my desire to paint. After taking art courses at night and teaching English, theology and art by day, with my community’s support, I left to take an MFA in Painting at Savannah College of Art and Design. My vocation changed to artist in 1999. I have studied art in China’s Central Academy and during a sabbatical in Italy. I presently have work in collections in Australia, Aruba, Antigua, Canada, China, England, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland, and throughout the United States. In 2004 my work was shown at The Telfair Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia and is now part of the permanent collection and on display at The Jepson Center for Contemporary Art.